Will We Ever See Monkey Island 3?

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Ron Gilbert discusses the future of the franchise.

By Andrew Goldfarb

It’s been a long road for the Monkey Island franchise. Originally launched in 1990, the series has seen five original games and a handful of special editions, but in the 21 years since Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge was released in 1991, fans have been asking one question: when can we expect Monkey Island 3?

This week, Ron Gilbert -- the creator of the franchise -- stopped by Up at Noon, and we decided to ask him that very question. Unfortunately, the answer wasn’t good news for Monkey Island fans.

“I’d really love to make Monkey Island 3,” Gilbert said. “Unfortunately, I don’t own the rights to that. That all belongs to LucasArts. Even if I started a Kickstarter and I raised like 30 million dollars, I really don’t think LucasArts would sell it.”

Despite the bad news for Monkey Island, Gilbert said he thinks adventure games have a bright future ahead of them, and he’s not expecting them to die out any time soon.

“I’m not worried about it at all,” he said. “I think a lot of genres are kind of absorbing adventure games. You see a game like LA Noire, and a lot of people think LA Noire is an adventure game because it has absorbed so many elements from adventure games. I don’t think they’ll ever die. They’re very story centric, they’re very character centric. I think people just like those kind of things.”

Gilbert also explained his love of adventure games, specifically noting the pace of the gameplay as his favorite element.

“I like adventure games because they’re actually slow and contemplative,” he said. “There’s not a lot of fast action and shooting. You’re really working your way through the games. You’re having to think. Some of the best moments for me in adventure games are when I’m just kind of sitting there trying to puzzle my way through something.”

Despite his love for adventure game mechanics, Gilbert added that story plays a huge part. In fact, building a game’s world and story are the first thing he worries about when creating a new game, and that allows the puzzles to come after.

“The story is paramount,” he said. “For me, when I start designing an adventure game, I always start with the world. The world is kind of the most important thing. For Monkey Island, it was that I loved the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. I wanted to live in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, so I kind of started with that as a world. I usually start with world, then I start with story, then I layer the puzzles under the story. Because in an adventure game, puzzles are really what drive the narrative forward.”